Karen Munro, Learning Librarian

Here are some of the recent reference questions from the Moffitt Library and Environmental Design Library ref desks, as well as questions asked online via our pilot Chat Reference service.

I’m not a current Delicious Library user, but based on the overview in this article in Wired, I’m starting to think I should be. Click through the “next image” links to see how gorgeously this tool represents books, CDS, and other items, how it connects them to online services, and how it allows classification/categorization by title, author, genre, language, format, cost, etc. Like LibraryThing, but on steroids. Really good steroids.

I’m madly spinning plates in preparation for the LAUC-B “Academic Library 2.0″ conference we’re hosting here at UCB this Friday, and at which I’m presenting with friend and colleague Jesse Silva. It’s going to be a great day, but in the meantime, I’m feeling a bit braindead. And so I post lint.

Washington Post: 13% of materials in the Library of Congress are missing. The thing I find so interesting about this is how galvanized the Reps are over it. It’s typical of how people think about libraries. When things are working right, they usually don’t pay much attention. But if they think things are working wrong, they’re needled beyond belief. I mean, the country is at war, and these folks are really upset about misplaced library books. Never underestimate the affective impact of libraries.

New York Times Opinion: an online economics professor tells all. If you could take an online Intro to Econ with only 18 other students, get personal attention from the instructor, pay a fraction of the cost of taking the class in person at Public University X, and get your prereqs for the rest of your degree, would you? Yeah, so would I. So would a lot of other high school and college students around the country, who don’t have the twenty-something thousand dollars per year that you need for a university degree these days. One way that online education seems to be fitting into the bigger picture of higher education is in this niche–knocking down the 101s. Might be a very good solution for everyone, since the in-person solution has traditionally been lecture halls of five hundred students, taught by beleagured professors and GSIs.

Also, I’ve been rediscovering the joys of iTunes U lately. Free online education is a wonderful thing.

Library Journal’s article about library gardens.  A partnership between the Horticultural Society of New York and the public library system–what a great idea!

Another great link from the Wired Chronicle.  Michael Wesch’s new YouTube video, collaborating with 200 undergraduate students about what life is like for them.

I loved this piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education about a grad student at Stanford who’s suing spammers, and donating the settlements to charity.  Go, Joe!

The UC Berkeley library is sponsoring a series of speakers from other institutions as part of our regeneration and rejuvenation process. Our first speaker was Betsy Wilson, Dean of University Libraries at the University of Washington. I was asked to blog the content of her session, and give some responses. It was a great session and I took pretty thorough notes, so I post the content here behind the jump, to protect everyone’s RSS readers from overload…

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Casey Bisson’s contribution to a recent piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education about the future of librarianship:

I don’t have a library-science education. I have an IT background. My undergrad was in English, but I have been employed as an IT person since then and have slowly made my way to libraries. I’m not sure that library science is as technically demanding as it should be for the challenges that new graduates will face. That was a discussion that was on a number of e-mail groups that I’m in. We face recent graduates who don’t have any experience in relational database design, and we expect them to understand how to choose a technology plan or choose technologies that will control their ability to serve users, and there is not enough knowledge in libraries to build that.

We’ve done no research and development in libraries — over the past 18 months there has been a blossoming of research and development, but before that we outsourced that to vendors.… We’ve outsourced the innovation. And because we only compare libraries against libraries and not against Google or anything else, we think we’re doing great. And Google says, “Yes, they are,” then takes all of our users. We need some very, very skillful new blood.

I’m not saying I’m that blood (not yet, maybe), but I absolutely, 100% agree with his point.

Thanks to Jennifer Sharkey for this link to an absolutely amazing use of Flickr images to create hyperlinked collages.  The resolution they’re achieving is incredible–the amount of data packed into these images (a panoramic view of the Canadian Rockies, Bleak House by Dickens) is astounding.  The implications for the creation of virtual environments, not to mention images for instructional use, are really something.

Also relevant:  Photosynth, a Microsoft tool that’s part of the underlying chassis.

This is not a good trend, in my opinion.

All the more reason our profession needs to get its act together, pull itself out of its tendency to sink into bureaucracy and introversion, and really market itself.  Public, independent libraries and archives are a hallmark of a healthy, free society, just like small-scale agriculture and strong local economies.  We need to affirm and reaffirm, publicly and clearly, what is good about these things and exactly what value they bring into our communities and our lives.  Otherwise, we face the erosion of our basic quality of life.

ALA should make a statement about the outsourcing and privatization of public libraries.  And we should all take a closer look at what’s going on here, and put ourselves in the shoes of a taxpayer or a library board member. As intelligent laypeople with busy lives, what would we want our library to offer us?  What would we be willing to pay for?  What would motivate us to fight to keep it around?